Overview
Book Title: Rework
Authos: Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
Year: 2010
Cameron’s Rating: 6/10
Notes
- We need less than we think to start a business.
- Hard work isn’t that difficult if we are confident it’s the work we should be doing. It becomes much more difficult, however, if we find ourselves questioning why it must be done.
- Prioritizing which work actually drives value is especially important in small businesses because they have limited resources.
- Meetings may occasionally be worth it, but we must acknowledge that they have a very high cost.
- The author believes we should set an alarm to indicate when the time we have allotted for a meeting has run out. It seems this would add urgency to the meeting and also prevent meetings from taking up more time than we had intended.
- We should end all meetings with a solution and assign someone to implement that solution.
- Being stuck will gradually exhaust you. To keep steady momentum, you should form a habit of setting smaller milestones and achieving small victories along the way to your greater goal.
- You may start on a task thinking it will only take 2-3 hours to finish. After working 2-3 hours, however you may realize said task may actually take 15-20 hours. When this happens, it’s often a good idea to ask others if the task is still worth doing. You may find priorities have changed — or you’ve been thinking about the task incorrectly and with some adjustments it could still be completed in a much shorter amount of time than your newly revised estimate.
- Sometimes the optimal solution to a problem is giving up.
- The larger a task is, the farther our estimate deviates from the reality of how long the task will task. This is why breaking large tasks into smaller tasks is so important.
- Whenever you have a large problem, you should try to break it up into smaller and smaller problems until each small problem becomes fairly easy to solve in isolation.
- By making many small decisions, it’s likely that the ego will be less involved in each decision. This makes it easier to have good judgement and later pivot if necessary.
- When you’re always worried about your competitors, you don’t have any time to improve yourself.
- It’s almost inconceivably difficult to defeat a competitor with established systems by following the same rules they’ve created. To win you need to set your own rules of the game and not only rely on their rules.
- If you agree to everything, you’ll soon have a pile of obligations so large you won’t be able to see what you should actually be doing.
- You should rather get rid of old customers than not be able to attract new customers.
- Your eagerness to implement a new idea does not always correspond to the value said idea could potentially deliver.
- Being honest and vulnerable with your customers may make you appear less professional, but your sincerity will cause customers to love you.
- Your product should be so good that customers want it from the first time they try it.
- You should never hire someone to do work you’ve never at least tried to do yourself. Trying to do the work yourself will help you determine whether you need to hire a full-time employee, part-time employee, or whether you need anyone else at all. Having experience doing the work of those that report to you will also help you be a better manager.
- When one of your employees quits or leaves the company, you generally shouldn’t replace them immediately. Instead, you should wait to see how long you can maintain things without their help. You may be surprised to realize you need less employees than you thought.
- Unnecessary work that’s labeled “necessary” will lead to unnecessary plans, unnecessary costs and unnecessary complexity.
- Interview performances are not entirely indicative of how someone will actually perform in their role.
- Because interview performances can be misleading, you should consider having a trial period of around 20-40 hours for new hires to observe how they work, see the questions they ask, and determine whether they are actually capable of doing the job.
- If you find a problem with your product/service you should let your customers know the issue and inform them that you’re working to solve it. You shouldn’t hide problems from your customers because they will find the problem, likely post it online, and then everyone will know about the issue.
- One of the worst ways to apologize is to say sorry but not actually accept any responsibility over the events that have occurred or how you made others feel.
- One great thing about connecting with your customers directly is that you can more clearly understand the things that annoy them. Likewise, seeing the satisfaction your product/service brings your customer can be used as a powerful source of motivation.
- Requiring employees to ask their superiors for permission on every small minutiae only results in two things. The employees feel their superiors do not trust them, and the employees lose their ability to be creative and think critically.
- Your company doesn’t generally need policies for one off wrongdoings. For the most part, policies only need to be created for mistakes that are repeated.
- You should talk to your customers like they are a friend sitting next to you.
- Whenever you write something, you should think about the person who will read what you wrote.
- Things that don’t last forever are merely inspiration and inspiration is like freshly picked fruit — it has an expiration date.
Takeaways
Here are a few things I took away from Rework.
#1 Being Stuck Will Gradually Exhaust You
I’ve definitely seen the above concept to be true in software development. When a problem is exceedingly difficult, or your progress is nigh on nonexistent, it’s easy to feel demotivated — to become overwhelmed and feel all of the energy drain out of your body.
It’s also true in life. Forming a plan for how you’ll reach your goals and overcome obstacles along the way isn’t merely a matter of efficiency. It’s a method of ensuring energy expansion rather than depletion.
#2 Predict, Act, Then Reevaluate if Necessary
Sometimes the right move is giving up or moving in another direction. You may predict a certain task such as learning a language may only take 400 hours. If 200 hours in, however, you realize you’re only 10% of the way there rather than 50%, there’s no shame in reevaluating whether the task should still be prioritized or if it would be possible for you to change methods to speed up your progress and achieve your original goals in an amount of time closer to your original estimate.
#3 Meeting Alarms & Assignments
Using alarms to indicate the time alotted for a meeting has expired is a good way of ensuring urgency during the meeting. Meetings should end with solutions being agreed upon and individuals being assigned responsibility to implement said solutions.
Conclusion
I actually read the Vietnamese version of Rework (Khác biệt để bứt phá) rather than the English one. This was the first full-length book I’ve ever read in a foreign language. I chose to read this book as it’s the book the CEO at my company most often cites during meetings.
For that reason, I had high expectations for this book. Unfortunately, it didn’t entirely live up to them. I don’t think the information contained in Rework was off-base or misleading. I felt the points made in the book were too heavily supported by anecdotes rather than research, however.
I also didn’t feel this book changed the way I view the world in a signficant way. There are some books such as The Truth by Neil Strauss that completely shifted the way I viewed the world.
I think the mark of an excellent book is that it leaves a mark on you. The person you were before reading the book and the person you became after reading the book are markedly different.
While Rework had a few good tips here and there, it wasn’t as transformative as I had hoped it would be.